I am going to say anything in this essay that is totally politically incorrect to even odium for most people. I have the right and privilege to do this deed. I am a natural aristocrat living on a pension and social security in a loose and scrambling republic that never punished anyone for their opinions because they are certain all people and their ideas as well are trivial. As a result all kinds of real issues that plague us are handled with civility by listeners but are never traced as other than the banter of cracker barrel cranks and the daft. Like a beggar or a prince I can be killed more easily than fired for speaking my mind.

The most important issue in American democracy is that more than half the population has no faith in it whatsoever. They donít vote. Our presidents lately have been elected by a third to a fourth of the possible voting electorate. More than 50% of us including myself feel that the politicians never bring up matters that are relevant to us, if they did and were elected they wouldnít act on them but would make a deal with the other asst to rule with more of a broad mandate, that the general tenor of leaders on both the right and the left since Eisenhower has been, to put it civilly, lamentable.

One can't argue that a majority of Americans have rejected their political system and think that democracy isnít working. One can only say that their assessment is true or untrue. I donít think a persuasive case can be made for the quality of our presidents since Eisenhower; some think he wasnít too good either. At least he was qualified, had managed al large operation successfully, wasnít anybodyís wastrel son. After Eisenhower, fugget it. Itís not an accident; itís systematic. The kind of money it takes to mount any campaign even for dogcatcher in a local village really puts political life outside the aegis of all by the very rich or somebody who takes orders from them.

Iím hardly the only person who says this. In inimitable John McCaine has not only said it; he has introduced bills in Congress to remedy it. I.F. Stone put it a different way decades ago c when he said American government honors the specific interest in preference to the general one. Fro some reason hardly mysterious to any of us we are still getting machine candidates who are the progeny of the rich like John Kennedy or the two inept Bushes, or poor boys who have a glossy manner of lackeys and know how to respond to an important telephone call.

Itís not as if we need to be philosophers or insiders in the political system to understand this ordinary verity. Weíve all been in some situation in our lives when weíve called upon the government to remedy some difficulty it claims to be able to sole or at least mildly ameliorate. Thatís the moment we discover we are scramblers in limbo without franchise, legal aliens without the advantages of illegality that include a discreet invisibility. We are cattle if we are lucky, more despised
designated prey if we are less fortunate.

One can have this epiphany by a variety of routes. Some of the circumstances are banal beyond banality. One can get auto insurance and discover the companies licensed by the state and wonít pay off when oneís car is totaled while parked on a deserted street. It happened to me. One can find out in court if one is getting divorced that there is a two tiered system that has no legal bases that runs the courts and which makes males designated prey. That happened to me too for awhile align with fifty million another American braves. We all have our stories. The bottom of all of them is that we arenít represented by anybody; we are without franchise like any Mexican who has cross the Rio Grade to work among us and are on our won. We have the option of fooling ourselves unlike the Mexicans by voting. Voting for the leader who is going to ignore us is for some perverse reason repugnant to us and beneath us. One should say that the several million Americans who have been designated as felons for smoking the worn leaf aren't voting either. The illegal aliens from all over the world who are working among us arenít vomiting either. Given the candidates and the juggernaut machines that foal them like cockroaches out of insect pods in the shadows of the walls they arenít missing much.

When Arnold Schwartzenegger became governor of California and Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota they baht out more voters than anyone knew had existed. Both men have a nice talent for frankness and seem to be basically honest in a way that our usual army of lawyers who are in poultices would regard as unimaginable. As soon as somebody shows up who seems to be outside the current political system the vetoers, all of whom want to have honest and competent leaders, come out of the closet and vote for Arnold and Jesse. The Establishment doesn't get the point. They claim Arnold and Jesse are sports or eccentrics. Of course they are protecting the franchise of corrupt lawyers to run the country. Itís a central distinction. I know plenty of honest and decent lawyers.

As an oldster who has seen fashions and seasons in social hopes come and go, whenever nearly anyone talks to me about contemporary American politics I feel as they have been misdirected by master magicians to look at a subterfuge while somebody is picking their pocket and even walking off with their tie, socks and shoes. Itís as if they have lost their brains as they listen to the demagogic palaver of lawyers, movie actors and professional wrestlers.

Of them all the most honest on the circuit of this traveling circus is Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler. Somewhere behind him but not far is the frankly speaking Arnold Schwartzenegger. It says something about our more ordinary masters of deceit that Jesse and Arnold, trained in deception like Las Vegas card sharks, are leagues above the lawyers we commonly have as our leaders in candidness and honesty.

Our more common demagogues and their disciples all speak wither Right or Left of the vice and folly of certain leaders, the relative honesty and good sense in the remedies of their favorites. Itís a good guys versus bad guys scenario I used to feel was silly when I watch Roy Rogers cowboy movies at seven. Iím always started when I see it in politics; I expect more intelligence from my friends who are less skeptical of the old routine than I am. Itís a mark of stupidity or willful innocence after a while to act like rubes at a country carnival. As they walk away from the spectacle with bottles of genion snake oil and views of the two headed fat lady they gather amongst themselves to critique the show with a naive, shallow and gullible avidity for the manure oft he assesses that is astounding.

Among the interesting phenomena about Arnold and Jesse is their appeal to women. Both men are way outside anything the feminists would regard as other than brute and criminal. During Arnoldís campaign for governor he was smeared by them as a womanizer and ass pincher of stay females. The more these androgynous cohorts trashed Arnold for his swaggering interest in stray women, the more attractive he became to female California voters. Evidently they didnít want the feminist definitions of men anymore than men did. It suggested to insiders that a fashion in sexual tyranny was over.
For a few decades now America has been run on all levels by leaders who donít have the mandate of the common people. Itís lethal to democracy. In fact, not voting on Election Day becomes an act of democracy nowadays as voting for one of two thieves and scalawags never is or should be.

When Americans vote for Arnold or Jesse their act isnít all that far in spirit from the sainted year that Brazilians voted for a hippopotamus to be their president. Both Arnold and Jesse are intelligent men who like Abraham Lincoln have come up from nothing. They are legends who have earned their images in movies as outsiders. They are both improbable yet successful celebrities who have enriched us by their publici displays of male nature in its dark side as well as its virtues in a time when feminists have controlled the publishing world, schools and media with very different definitions of men, mostly wimps who pay child support, which theyíve pushed by stealth on a nation that doesnít accept their notions, wouldnít live under them if they could help it and certainly never voted for them nor wouldnít honor them in any way in the political arena.

Arnold and Jesse even made a movie together, Predator, which is the ultimately male live or die film nobody who saw it will never forget. It has almost no women in it. The heroes and the villains are all male hunters. They all talk a very earthy military sounding English. They are on their won in alien country. Itís clear Predator, like it or hate it, is a working out of a male hunting myth with an intriguing reversal; the alien is the hunter. Such tales are nurture to the primal spirit. Arnold and Jesse got the votes the did probably not merely largely from men. most middle class White Women, the kind that are some fossils thing are sympathetic to feminism because they are sure that radical cabal that would like to redefine everybody as the Marxists would is somehow the champion of women, just as most Germans once felt Hitler was a patriot. Arnold and Jesse got a lot of female votes as well as votes from the usually non-voting poor. The Left canít stand why they got them. When both got elected they called both the women and poor deluded. It happens when one is oneself adamant to enforce oneís own definitions of men and women on the world and one lacks an army and effective priesthood to do it.

Itís plain that something about both Arnold and Jesse as hugely muscled and violent primal males appeals to women and the poor. What one wants to do with that information is another story. The facts are irrefutable. Its one of the reasons why feministic have gone to the courts where they have to deal with one chivalric fool of a judge rather than to the polls to push their agendas. Itís also why the Left has pushed Welfare, the Justice System and sympathetic Marxist teaching in colleges by stealth, never by open debate much less a referendum. Every time there is a vote all these stalwarts are reminded that they are the few trying to muscle or seduce the many into laving and thinking in a way they donít want to live and think, just like the nefarious corporative world and its colonialist government, their supposed enemies.

In a curious way such action movies reflect as a parody the feminist hunger to have all-female plays and films, all-female social worlds of privilege, females like themselves in power. Itís crude sexual jingoism on both sides. Of course movies are fantasies; it might be that legal power is a fantasy too. It might be said, to paraphrase Marianne Moore, that most cultures including our own are a faints populated by real people, wars are illusions in which real people kill each other. Both directions, male solarity and feminism, express a kind of loss of heterosexual trust in both directions that should sadden us all. After all, one of the glories of human life along with the fulcrum for meditations on the nature of the other, is the intimacies between men and women, what happens in them, what wisdom and loss one sustains from them.

Voting for Arnold and Jesse was probably a resonance from the shadows from an entirely new set of voters. Letís remember that most of the people who arenít allowed to vote because they were locked up on some ridiculous private taste the state called a felony were men. The vote for Arnold and Jesse would have been even larger had those vast armies among the poor who had been convicted of smoking the wrong leaf and deprived of political franchise, would have voted too. Itís also true that in real life Arnold and Jesse were counseling compassion and charity for overhand in some very tacky dilemmas including Americana who fought for Al Qaeda about which normal politicians were pious and condemning. Arnold and Jesse were at a polarity in real life from advocating direct and decisive action like Hitler or Mussolini. They were true conservatives in the old sense. The worst things Arnold had to say about anyone were about compulsive debtors and disability frauds. Otherwise he liked everybody.

I think the big vote for Arnold and Jesse didnít come from men but from women. My guess is that females vote now much more than males. Itís understandable. Women would rather take power when they can garner it in a courtroom or a voting booth than an alley. Men know an alley is the great equalizer. Theyíve been left by the Lilt to solutions where divorce and defining them as volatile egoists with an option for future courtroom pillage has given them less practical power than they had before these supposed advocates of their interests weighed in with their agendas. One can pass any law one wants, run any order at a man one can file, but it doesnít help much when the man disappears as men who are really mobile are expert at doing since the days of the mammoth and one doesnít have any support in a home without a man when inmost come as they inevitably do. There are a lot of women who would like to have somebody like Jesse or Arnold around when the judges go home and the courtroom closes down. If they get one he can vanish much more easily than their ex-husband. They might not be able to keep them but they can vote for them.

Given the kind of disenfranchising laws that inspire men not to feel aport of the American system and vote, we donít have to look for the sources of this failure of democracy to parsed its citizens that it is for real. We might not count the ten to fifteen million males who have been netted by the Justice System juggernaut because they are now certified felons forever though most of them have done nothing but peruse their private taste and are hardly dangerous or violent.

The real theatre of education in which American men are schooled not to vote of course is the divorce courts. A man doesnít have to be a genius to see he is at the bottom of a two tiered system in spas that smell of blood like corridas in Spain and Mexico, then out on the street if he is lucky with a long indenture to his enemies to bring up his children to hate, despise and be indifferent to him. If a woman can walk off with his house and property by means a man would have to invoke in an act of pillage in war, if he doesnít see any candidates on the horizon, Right or Left, who speak for his supposed franchise in the system, he isnít going to vote. He may even legally disappear.

Of course it might get him out of the shadows if the candidate is Jesse or Arnold. Itís a statement to vote for the Terminator. However most likely at most he will hear the Right wingers talk about family values; at least the Left honestly says they are against the family, want to break it up on any pretext, aim to make women androgynous, put their to work, have children raised by experts from day care and so on; if they could would put the entire universe on Welfare in broken homes they call in their Newspeak single parent families.

The Right is just as invidious in its treachery to both men and women, each of them half the human race, not to mention its children because it mothers the axioms of family values yet while in power does nothing to throw out the Welfare system, the school system which cannot even teach literacy, upholds a federal mandate as they call it to monitor and arrest parents they donít like because they act like authorities when they want the state to be the only authority, set standards and act to keep them, the two tiered justice system which keeps many males of color from the bottom in jail and out of family life. Itís hard to run people, male or female, one they hit the bottom. Thereís no place further down to go.

America men might throw a few votes their way out of habit and training as children; after a couple of frustrating trips to the voting booth to elect Right wingers who keep them without an estate with policies of rule indistinguishable from the Left wingers in practice, they get the point. Like Ralph Ellisonís Invisible Man they learn in a thousand ways how to evade any part of the public American system and become at least as voters creatures of ultimate shadow. These days only Arnold and Jesse can bring them out.

I may seem to be lumping Arnold and Jesse together along with Ronald Reagan as seeming outsider politicians of the same order; they arenít. Jesse Ventura is really smart and deep; heís always brave and will say the unsayable. Thatís why he was elected in Minnesota. He had a radio program there over several years in which the votes had a chance to hear an very independent voice on any subject whatsoever.

Arnold may not have quite the intellectual credentials of Jesse; he does speak his nimble mind and he is plenty intelligent. They are both very amusing; Ronald Reagan isnít. Reagan has plenty of brains if he isnít overly gifted ahead a sense of humor. All three men arenít lawyers and have never been to law school. They all come up from nothing. Arnold wasnít even from this country originally. They all have functioned very well in the real world as well as films.

Yet the real critique of American men isnít that their country merely has the wrong leaders; the system betrays them in a business as usual ways that no leader could change short of a bloody revolution. Even if Arnold and Jesse in real life where what they were in the movies, they couldnít clean out the Augean stables of our hacks who in ordinary ways betray half and indirectly all the American citizenry. Any man, even a stupid and ignorant one, is above going to avoid a voting booth to vote for one of two spineless lawyers who hope if elected to continue to disenfranchise them quietly. The contempt of these leaders for women is such that they think most women will continue to disenfranchise themselves without their help. Theyíre wrong. Arnold got an army of female votes.

Rather interestingly the American system remains in the hands of men whose operation is to disenfranchise other men. most of the family Court judges who put million of men in indenture were men. The Senate and Congress is nearly all men. There is a always a token woman or two; there always have been a few very brilliant females in political power since Suffrage; a half a century ago it was Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine; now in the same collegium we have Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein.

Some men take a lot of pleasure out of using power in the courtroom to deprive other men of franchise legally just as they steal from other men when they occupying a town militarily. One canít blame women for the injuries men do to other men in the name of the law. Some of them probably tell themselves sentimentally, lulled chivalrically by the old feminist party line, they are predicting women against brutes and villains. They have been the principal apostles of lassoing a voting constituency for a democracy: a system that can only work if the populace participates in it in large numbers. Half of the American people are men.

By 2003 many of the politicians on the Right, even the center, have listened to their market research people tell them that most Americans are afraid or angry that the government is destroying their families. There is hardly a political candidate including Arnold himself who doesnít run for office without saying loudly how tight he is with his wife, how he is an old fashioned consummate family man. Conversely, there isnít a single candidate who claims he adheres to the feminist definition of men and women. Since these people all do lots of market research, the iceboat of one definition and the absence of the other among those aiming to cadge votes among an imploding voting population says everything one needs to know about the mandate of people who have contempt for family values and their chances to get any power at all by other than stealth.

Yet this isnít a sign that America is yet being offered politicians who profess family values, claim they are conventionally religious and mean if elected to legislate aggressively and effectively to bring men back to equality in the system of franchises; au contraire. Everybody knows itís lip service; whatever they say, more than half the American public on the evidence of what they do when in pokier, donít believe them. It only says that for those who vote at all, probably skewed hazily toward women, they too donít want the sort of radical Left wingers who honestly preach they want to bring down family and put everybody in a monitored parole on Welfare.

Arnold in such a climate even says he likes his mother in law. He also said once rather amusingly that his mother in law sends his religious books; he canít get through the second page fathom. Clearly the market research experts have been telling the politicians including Arnold that not only do Americans not trust either Left or Right singers about family values; they donít favor elevating those who lack some sort of faith in God to power either.

Arnold, to his credit, never claims to be a believer. He does say in his Austrian accent with deliberately irony that he is the ultimate American patriot. I would suspect he is. Austria never did anything for him. As he says, America made him rich, famous and gave him a chance to do what he was capable of. He probably is even more patriotic than he says he is.

Between Arnold and Jesse, one is a mere real hero than the other. They are both body boulders who have spent a lifetime lifting weights, working as movie actors and ordinary masters of public deception in different ways; Jesse really did volunteer for the Navy Seals and risk his life for the United States. In a curios way both represents the White trash wresting world that also in another emanation produced Johnny Cash, Elvis and James Dean.

This hunger for outsiders as our leaders, a feeling our conventional ones have failed us, also foaled Ronald Reagan in California. We donít; think of Reagan as other than the mask-like role he took for himself after a string of lousy movies; he is also the consummate improbable poor boy who rose to the top as a sportscaster, actor, union leader and politician. Reagan was never a body builder; he was a big broadshouldered rangy man who did play hunk roles in the movies from football players to hit men.

Behind this murky visit which we can only sketchily fathom from voting partners or lack of them is a kind of lesion in American politics that hasnít been resolved in the past few decades. The Left had worked hard in its heyday at destroying families and replacing definitions of marriage, men, women and children that come from traditional faiths with Marxist ideas of social engineering by experts. They were roundly defeated by 1960 at the pools of all places to the point where no Leftist can advocate those values now and even get elected for latrine supervisor.

One can infer from this that those who do vote still believe they can use the tools of democracy to keep the Marxists or who is running the machine of the day out of their life and out of power. Yet thereís never been any public debate at any time for family or for social engineers. Thereís been no Lincoln Douglas-like public discussions on anything at all. The very mechanics of democracy have been replaced by fashion and stealth.

The Right when elected has for the past quarter of a century said the magic words about family and family but continued to promote Welfare, Family Court, feminist notions of privilege, because they think they need the constituencies who back these notions to rule. In fact they lost on the evidence half their large constituency, knurl all of whom accept their status as legal aliens instead of merely illegal ones.

If current insider American politicians wanted to win back that male constituency, now voting for Arnold or Jesse, a sign of their return into democratic fantasy, they really would have to make a real chock between family values and some sort of faith and those who are against family and are polemically and aggressively antagonistic to franchising any notions of spirituality or other than epicurean and materialist morals. It shouldnít be that hard to make that choice.

The younger people who of the constituency most of us associate with the voting for the Left arenít left wing anymore and for good reason. Blacks and Puerto Ricans of the 50s and 70s may have gotten titular civil rights through the Left in the 30s but they were destroyed by Welfare in the 50s and 60s to the point where they largely even today arenít a competitive labor market thanks to permissive ideas in our public schools and notions of bottom stands about whom the state is obligated to support Certainly Blacks and Puerto Ricans arenít going to vote for the people who have consigned them to marginality and even a servant class anymore than men will vote for the same people.

As somebody who worked in the ghetto public schools through the 70s and 80s I was struck over and over again by how different the 80s kids were. They didnít have any truck on the evidence with the old ideas that Blacks and Hispanics were potentially a portal to a wonderful alternative life style, carnal and without noxious Western standards, a viable departure from scurvy Western epicurean materialist life. They knew neither African nor Spanish Latin America had ever had an Industrial Revolution; they are aware without any sadness that these places could never even be in a potential position of offering them the kind of comfortable materialist life they wanted like everybody else of all colors and persuasions.

One of my peers in our tragic enterprise of preempting culture in the schools, a wonderful Puerto Rican peat married to a righteous Black woman, both living in the ghetto projects, put it this way: ĒMarx never knew the capacity of the proletariat for infinite corruption.Ē Itís way of honoring in leftist engage that both the poor and the middle classes in America wanted to live comfortably and securely, that the Left with more money and fewer enemies than the Bolsheviks ever had, couldnít offer them either one in America. The Marxists had control of the American poor and indigent for half a century with no questions asked, were less checked by external force than any other Marxist regime claimed the magical capacity to manage the populace. The only way the polloi escaped them was either by flight or death. That pithily is the story of American inner cities and why people including its veterans, survivors and graduates if they vote at all vote for Arnold.

The adults that failed these artificially impoverished kids werenít Right wing racists maniacs of the White persuasion keeping them down. It was a disaster run by mandarin Left Wing utopians armed with Welfare legitimacy supported indirectly by our colonial empire driving them into a war zone of a nightmare selenic geography, their hapless charges totally vulnerable economically because the progressive schools had cozened them as types into an uncompetitive lack of literary. Believe me, when one works in slum schools it isnít the violence that keeps the student from learning. School are and were always violent. Kids are often nasty and violent as well even if they are in prep school. It was the lack of deferral of satisfaction with all the attendant infantile anger that comes from embracing such a dour faith, and the dearth of any viable work ethic that did them in. One can only get the values of such a regimen of the spirit valued by those who learn it in retrospect. Nobody was willing to be adversarial and get the kids to internalize what they needed to be competitive, free and powerful adults later.

The Blacks and Hispanic kids wouldnít have gone as heavily as they did for material values in the 80s and beyond hadnít the Leftist radicals of the 70s with lots of power and clout to muscle little children and beggars hadnít failed them all as much as they did.

Maybe the last people to know that anybody of color under thirty five or so now sees the Left as their enemy, not the Right. It wasnít slavery that broke up their families in their memory; it was Welfare. Middle class people under thirty five feel the same way about feminism. The gap between one set of potential voters and another is fashioned in stone by who did what to whom among the old and among the young in their lifetime. When they become fossils and caught in their own time envelope they watch it happen to the newly virile from a nursing home.

The aging Left who live as if there is still the old vertical system of right Wing racism and stern and senile Senators blocking civil rights of Blacks and Hispanics are perceiving a different realm than the younger ones who see maundering Leftist institutions like the school system and Welfare interring them permanently in the same economic cemetery.

Much of the Left I meet is childless or perhaps has one adopted Korean child. They are dying out. Young women who want kids and families as most of them do don't think that the feminists are their champions. They know that fourteen hours a day of grueling corporate work isnít a remedy for family dilemmas because theyíve suffered broken homes, lived under the aegis of weary and irritable mothers and absent fathers kicked out of authority and even proximity to them. They donít have any illusions about feminist answers to even choices in flavors of ice cream. They might have more hope in the palliative of pharmaceutical anti-depressants that followed in the fashions of formally educated dupes after the bloody rise and fall of feminism.

The young women of America after a few decades of ordinary divorce canít make much of case for the security and virtue of family life to men as women in the 50s could. A hope for family life was what put tens of millions of American men into indenture in the last half of the last century. Young men in America donít want to live through that Golgotha and humiliation as their fathers did.

They donít have the memory of a man who had freedom and power in their home; they recall if they have an image of their father at all a desperate and hairiest man nipped at by legal beagles with no freedom and power trying to hang on to a few shards of what he had honestly contracted for, depressed, anxious, afraid, and finally freed only when he realized his domestic intents had always been doomed and it was time to pack up and go on. Thatís their family traction. Itís real as devouring a turkey on Thanksgiving.

Every women equally for good and bad reasons wants a world in which men presumptively trust them. Otherwise they canít even hope to have a hearth. They certainly canít compete against the long American tradition of brothels and lone women who want a bit of money up front yet will never ruin menís lives in the way wives with families can and have done in the United States in the past few decades.

The women are the big losers in the long run every time a judge kicks a man out of the home and orders him to pay child support, every time Welfare gives women a bounty for doing the job themselves. They arenít a secure Left constituency anymore than the poor of color are. When they vote if they ever do, they will vote for Arnold.

Abut a century and a half ago Benjamin Disraeli wrote a book called The Two England in which is wafted the novel theory that England was a duo of countries, the rich and the poor, occupying the same physical space. In a curious way we are living in the two Americas. One is the legitimate world of our system, the other the shadowy one that manifests itself only occasionally in voting for Arnold or Jesse because like all legitimate and unorganized states, it perceives it benefits by remaining invisible.

American politicians have been pretending to rule both countries; itís plain from the non-voters that at best they only are governing one of these two nations. Piety and decisiveness taken to its logical end when in power tends to do that. The resolution of two nations living in the same place almost certainly has to make many enemies, be ugly if not violent. Given the lack of any army and mandate on one side, the lack of access to franchise on the other its no wonder Arnold and Jesse have been such popular politicians.

A courtroom is a fantasy of law in which real men for hire argue positions they donít believe in about issues they would not even take up for an instant without a high and generous fee. This view of work and life doesn't change much when they run for office. They get their opinions from market research polls. They think they can cut a deal as Lyndon Johnson did in the 60s with five different specific interests paying lucre into their coffers and the general public gets nothing. They for better or worse are not the people Americans want to lead them. They claim that outsiders like Arnold and Jesse can't do the job; these louts donít have their sacred expertise. The truth is the opposite. The lawyers havenít done the job.

Jesse and Arnold at least in the movies and professional wrestling, have been champions in two quintessential American theaters of fantasy. When reality is an inescapable odium, dreams arenít quite as negligible as they ordinarily might be. They have been able to take on an enemy with force and decisiveness in a communal world of vapor if not elsewhere. If Arnold and Jesse are creatures of electronic ether, when fantasy becomes reality it usually begins in something like Art or the theory of one or more hermits. In our time it may commence as a tawdry brand name dream.